


Trip Wire

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Bombs, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 02:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7489533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Former reconnaissance scout. This won't be my first time defusing a bomb." Daniel knows bombs, but it's a little different when it's Peggy's life at stake, and he's having to talk Jack through defusing the bomb over the radio. For my h/c bingo wildcard square, "explosions."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trip Wire

**Author's Note:**

> At least some of the land mine info in this fic is made up for dramatic effect. Teller mines (also spelled Tellermine) are real, and the descriptions are as accurate as I could get, but they don't quite work as described here, and anything I couldn't find specific details on (or the actual details didn't fit my plot) I made up. For that matter, I've fudged the operation of actual walkie-talkie radios ever so slightly, but we know they have two-way open-channel radio communication on the show (they use it with Jarvis in 2x06, for example) so I'm taking some creative license.

"If I knew this place was a freakin' fortress, I woulda brought a tank."

Peggy acknowledged Jack's quip with a wry twist of her mouth, looking up at the forbidding wall of boxcars and wire fencing surrounding the wrecking yard. A single bright light on a pole illuminated the area around the front office, behind closed and padlocked gates. It was a bitterly cold November night, and a damp fog muffled the farther reaches of the wrecking yard and covered both ends of the untrafficked street, making the small cluster of SSR cars appear to float in a gray and silent world.

They were somewhere deep in the maze of warehouses, factories, docks, vacant lots, rail yards, and industrial-looking businesses that made up this part of the New Jersey shore. Peggy had lost track of the twists and turns; at this point she'd have been hard pressed to say exactly where they were, other than "somewhere in Jersey." They were on the trail of a rogue SSR agent, one of the last holdouts in their corruption cleanup following Vernon Masters' downfall. According to their intel, he'd gone to ground at a wrecking yard owned by his uncle.

"Getting soft out there in sunny California?" Jack remarked as Peggy drew her jacket more tightly around her, slipping a half-numb hand into the pocket to feel the comforting weight of her service weapon.

"Don't be absurd. A good freezing fog gets the blood pumping."

Peggy's current official position was a position created just for her, East Coast liaison to the West Coast bureau. It was a compromise Jack and Daniel had cooked up between them, which kept her attached to Jack's department but out in L.A. 90% of the time. However, it meant that Jack could borrow her back when he had the urge, and Peggy was starting to think he made a point of doing so on the coldest and most miserable days of the year.

Jack had the boot of the car open, retrieving a pair of bolt cutters, while the other agents assembled around them. "May I?" Peggy inquired, relieving him of them.

"Be my guest," Jack said dryly, letting go without a struggle. "Though, if you don't mind, at least wait 'til I check if Shelburne's and Vickers' teams are in position before you start destroying things."

While Jack checked the other teams' location over the radio, Peggy inspected the padlock. There was a faint humming from the fence that did not appear to come from the pole-mounted light. "It's electrified," she informed the others when they joined her.

"Not for long," Jack muttered. He went to the boot again and came back with a large wrench, set one end on the damp ground and jumped back quickly, letting it fall against the fence. There was an impressive burst of sparks and an audible pop from an unseen fuse box somewhere down the fence.

Peggy cracked off the padlock with a satisfying crunch. The gates swung open with a tortured creak, and the agents, guns at the ready, began to fan out, their shoes crunching on gravel.

"Calhoun!" Jack called. His voice echoed down shadowed, silent corridors between untidy stacks of scrap metal. "This is the SSR. You're surrounded and badly outnumbered. Best thing for it is to come out right now and give yourself up."

There was no response, only a barking dog somewhere in the distance, and the low rumble of a train passing through one of the nearby rail yards.

"Ed," Jack said, his voice lower this time, with a pleading note. "You know you can't win. Look at the situation, man. You're outnumbered and outgunned, and your picture is hanging on the wall in every post office and transit station in the Tri-State area. Right now you haven't done anything you can't come back from. Get yourself a good lawyer, offer to flip on some other guys, and you'll probably walk." 

No answer. Jack shook his head and checked the load in his revolver.

"Think he's here, boss?" one of the other agents asked quietly.

"Can't be sure. We'll have to assume he is." Jack jerked his head at the dark, closed office, a small building just inside the gates. "Ferguson, Ramirez, make sure there's no one in there and then cover the front. The rest of you, spread out, stay alert, and check in every few minutes." He scanned the group of them, paused with a brief nod for Peggy, and went off to the left, gun in hand.

Peggy went right. The place was a maze, she quickly found, with narrow corridors winding between great heaps of rusted-out barrels, construction debris, half-crushed truck frames, outdated iceboxes, hand-cranked washing machines, and a thousand other forms of rubbish. It went on and on, stretching back for acres. There were other lights along the fence, but the farther she penetrated into the interior, the less light there was -- a whole world of capricious, ink-black shadows that could be hiding any number of gunmen.

During the war, this must have been one of many scrap-metal yards that did a brisk business repurposing old vehicles and appliances as raw materials for Uncle Sam's factories. Now, in the post-war era, what she saw around her was a mix of surplus military materiel, too ruined to be resold on the consumer market, and trash too old and rusty to have much value except in terms of the raw iron it contained.

Still, despite the deserted and abandoned appearance of the place, the padlock had been shiny and new, and obviously someone was paying the electric bill.

The wire caught her eye only because it was shiny, and it happened to be positioned just so that it caught the light of the nearest light pole, shining down over the palisades of rubbish. In bright sun, it would have been all but invisible. Peggy stopped cold, her wartime instincts running on high alert, and crouched to examine it. The wire was strung about a foot off the ground, low enough to be hard to see, but high enough to trip an unwary intruder. It vanished into the shadowed trash at either side of the corridor, so she couldn't see what it was attached to, but she had a feeling she wouldn't have liked it much.

With a ball of ice in her stomach, she keyed her radio. "Be careful," she said. "There are booby traps. I've found a trip wire."

Jack's voice came back immediately. "You okay?"

"I didn't trip it, if that's what you mean." She stepped over it very carefully, testing the ground behind with her toes before she proceeded forward.

"I don't like this. Teams, check in," Jack ordered.

As the responses came in over the radio, Peggy headed onward, one cautious step at a time, alert for anything else at ankle level -- which was why she wasn't expecting the soft click and faint give under her foot as it came down on a damp patch of gravel that looked the same as anywhere else.

Peggy froze. A flush of cold sweat raced down her spine.

"Got a dead-end here," one of the agents was saying over the radio.

"Anyone else spot anything like what Carter was talking about?" Jack asked.

"Think I found what could be another trip wire back here," Vickers said. "Thought it was just a loose cable or something, but now that I think about it, gut said to avoid it, so I did."

There was a brief window of dead space on the radio, giving Peggy the opportunity to speak. "I've found something else," she said. Her voice came out glacially calm. "I've stepped on what I believe may be a land mine."

An instant of total radio silence, then Jack snapped, "Everyone fall back, _now._ Retrace your steps exactly. Don't touch _anything._ We'll set up a cordon and come back by daylight. Carter, what are you doing now?"

"Standing very still," Peggy said. Small tremors ran up her legs. She tried very hard to stop them, and clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.

She had always considered herself level-headed in a crisis. It was a little shocking to realize how quickly her senses could flee under the crushing weight of sudden, blind panic. However, after the initial rush of terror, like white noise drowning out all possibility of rational thought, she realized that she had not blown up yet, which could mean it was defective or improperly set.

 _Or maybe I'm completely wrong,_ she thought. _Perhaps it's not a mine at all. I should check before alarming everyone._

She began, very cautiously, to crouch.

The radio had gone silent again after a babble of responses to Jack's order, agents filling the empty spaces on the radio as quickly as each person stopped talking. Now Jack said, "Carter, where are you?"

"I don't suggest you come my way, Jack." With exquisite care, trying to hold her feet perfectly still, she squatted down. Her heart was beating rapidly.

"That's not what I asked. I saw you turn right. Either you give me directions or I'll search this whole damn booby-trapped place 'til I find you. The rest of you," he added, _"stay out._ Unless any of you have demolitions experience, in which case, sing out. One of you -- how about Ramirez -- call back to HQ and see about mobilizing a bomb detail out here. Carter, talk to me."

"If you are determined to persist in this madness, I took the farthest right avenue from the gate," Peggy said absently, still engaged in her slow-motion crouch. "I took the third left into the interior, and turned right at the end, which is the point when I encountered the trip wire. Now please let me concentrate for a minute."

She had crouched far enough to reach the ground, though her calves and thighs were already burning at the awkward angle, and had realized that with the gun in one hand and the radio in the other, she didn't have a hand free for investigating round her feet. The radio was probably more important than the gun at the moment. Moving slowly, she slipped it into her pocket -- mustn't change her weight; if she was standing on a mine, she couldn't be sure how sensitive it was -- and then very cautiously brushed away some of the gravel near her foot.

"So _find_ them!" Jack was saying over the radio. "Wake up every off-duty agent we have. Call the NYPD too -- the military -- damn it, we're next door to the biggest city in the country and within spitting distance of the nation's capital. If we can't find someone who can disarm a bomb at one in the morning, we may as well be in Podunk, Iowa."

Peggy couldn't see very well in the darkness, but she could catch the dull metallic gleam of something metal beneath the gravel. There was definitely something down there. She swallowed hard. Her calves were starting to cramp.

"Peggy?" Jack's voice said, not over the radio but in person.

She had to crane her head around to see him. He was down at the end of the corridor of rubbish, which she was about halfway along. The lights along the fence gleamed off his blond hair, glittering on the drops of water left by the fog.

"Stop," Peggy said sharply, as he started toward her, scanning the ground. "The trip wire is about twelve feet behind me. I was in the middle of the pathway, so I would stay there if I were you. No telling what's at the sides."

She had to stop, clenching her teeth against the cramping in her calves. Crouching down had been a terrible mistake; she didn't dare put down a hand to catch herself, and she was very much afraid that she was going to fall over, with lethal results. She wasn't sure if she had enough strength in her thighs and knees to stand up without touching the ground, but she might have seconds, no more, before she lost her balance --

A gloved hand caught hers. Peggy looked up, with a gasp, at Jack looking down at her.

"What can I do?" he asked simply.

"Help me stand up, please."

He was standing as far away from the mine as he could get, his arm extended as far as it would go and still hold onto her. Trying to use his hand as a steadying influence only, without resting too much of her weight on it, and trying equally hard not to push down with her feet, Peggy very slowly and carefully retraced her crouch in reverse. Once she was standing erect again, she drew a deep, shuddering breath.

"Thank you," she said. "That was _not_ a good idea."

"You were checking around your feet?"

Peggy nodded.

"Find anything?"

"Metal plate," she said. "I can't tell how far it goes, but it's not small. I believe I may be standing on an anti-tank mine."

Jack blanched; his shadowed face seemed to draw tight over the bones. "God," he whispered. "I'm going to take a look, all right?"

Peggy nodded.

He let go of her hand -- she hadn't even realized he was still holding onto it -- and crouched carefully. With the lightest brushes of his gloved fingertips, he shifted the gravel, pushing it up against the side of her shoe instead of brushing it off the metal surface. Then he shook his head and stood up again. 

Peggy stood looking at him, while the quivering muscles in her legs gradually stopped twitching and aching. They were only a few feet apart. He might as well have been on the moon.

"I don't know much about this kind of munitions," he said. "Explosives were never my bag. But I think you're right, it's an anti-tank mine. If it were antipersonnel, it would've gone off when you stepped on it. A lot of the tank mines were designed to trip on release, so they'd explode under the body of the vehicle."

"Please tell me you know how to disarm one," Peggy said. She tried not to let her voice hitch. She was starting to shiver now, from a combination of cold, shock, and reaction, and trying to control it made her so rigid that her voice was a tight rasp.

"I'm sorry. I don't. But," he added, and held up his radio, "we have an entire office full of intelligent people, nearly all of whom have military experience. We have _got_ to have some demolitions experts in this agency."

"I know one," Peggy said.

Jack raised his eyebrows at her, a silent question.

"Daniel."

"Really?"

"He was a reconnaissance scout. I've seen him disarm a bomb."

"That would be incredibly useful if he weren't in L.A. right now. Somehow I don't think you want to stand there for sixteen hours while we fly him over here."

"No," she said, and her teeth snapped together, chattering without her permission. "I do not."

Jack looked at her across the infinite five-foot space between them. "We're gonna get you out of this," he told her, and then turned away, as if the intimacy had grown too great to bear. "This is Thompson," he snapped into the radio. "Okay, so, I'm pretty sure Carter's standing on an anti-tank mine. Any luck finding any guys with a demolitions background?"

"Nobody who's here tonight, Chief," Ferguson's voice said. "Ramirez is back at the car, on the horn to the office. They're on the hunt."

"Even if they can find someone who's available, it'll take them hours to get out here," Peggy said.

Jack shook his head and held up his hand in her direction. "Ferguson, listen," he said. "I need you to find out if there's a working phone in the wrecking yard office."

"It's locked, Chief."

"I _know_ that!" Jack burst out. "So kick the door down! You're a federal agent and this is an emergency. If there is not a phone in that office, we'll have to use the higher-powered radio in the car and relay everything through the main SSR office, but it'd be a lot easier if we can use the radios out here."

"What are you planning?" Peggy asked. Her hips were starting to ache; she tried to swivel and give herself a little relief without moving her feet.

Jack gave her a tight smile. "We're gonna call L.A."

 

***

 

It was hard, sometimes, for Daniel to believe that he'd managed to get through six months with Peggy on the other side of the country. Having her gone for three days was a hardship now. 

Without her here, there was no reason not to work late -- not that he was any less likely to work late _with_ Peggy here; they were a mutually bad influence on each other. He had to admit, though, that a part of him shied away from going home to a dark and empty house.

It was about time to knock off, though. The clock was crawling toward ten, he'd had enough coffee to make his back teeth float, and his eyes were starting to burn and transpose words as he stared at the case files spread out on his desk. He was just pushing back his chair and considering which of the various takeout options to grab on his way home, when one of the night-shift agents stuck his head in the door.

"Chief, New York's on the line. They said it's urgent."

Daniel nodded and his hand hovered over the phone, while he flicked a glance at the clock. A minute ago he'd been watching the hands gradually creep around the dial; now his only concern was for the late hour. It was after midnight on the East Coast. He clenched his teeth and tried not to invite trouble.

_Peggy's fine. It's only ..._

But, in the endless wait while the call was connected, he couldn't think of a single good reason why they would need to talk to him at this hour that didn't involve something terrible.

"Chief Sousa?" He didn't recognize the voice. "Good, I'm glad I caught you at the office. I was just gonna call in and get your home number, but they said you were still at your desk."

"Yeah, and who's this?" He didn't mean to be impatient, but it was all he could do not to reach through the line and shake some sense into whoever it was.

"Agent Ferguson, sir. The Chief needs to talk to you. Let me know if you have trouble hearing him and I'll turn it up."

 _Turn what up?_ Daniel wanted to ask, but Ferguson was saying, somewhere away from the receiver, "He's right here, sir," and then there was a hiss of static that made Daniel wince, followed by Jack's voice saying, "Sousa?"

"Yeah, here." Daniel could barely hear him. It was about the worst long-distance connection he'd ever heard. _Where exactly did they patch me through to, a phone booth at the bottom of a well?_

"Carter says you know a thing or two about bombs."

"Oh, that's an excellent way to lead into the conversation, Jack, not at all panic-inducing," Peggy's dry voice said, even fainter and more static-obscured. 

Daniel went weak with relief; his legs folded and he collapsed into his chair. She was all right. Which brought up the question, though -- why were they calling him in what was, for them, the middle of the night?

"Care to tell me what's going on?" he asked.

"So, yes or no on the bombs, Sousa." There was a whipcrack of tension in Jack's voice, and it dawned in Daniel, now that his immediate worry about Peggy was less of an acute spike in the back of his brain, that all was not well, wherever they were.

"I was a recon scout," he said. "I've disarmed a few." More recently than he wanted to admit to, in fact; they'd never _quite_ told Jack all the details of their less-than-legal activities in pursuit of Whitney Frost. "Jack, please tell me you don't have a bomb there."

"Carter's standing on a land mine."

Daniel nearly dropped the receiver. _"What?"_

"You should see the look she's giving me right now. There's no way to ease into news like that, is there? So the thing is, Sousa, you're gonna have to walk us through disarming it, or at least getting her off it."

"Where the hell _are_ you?" was all he could think to ask. The terrible connection gave him nightmare images of the two of them traipsing around some frozen forest in France or Germany. Peggy wouldn't have left the country without telling him, would she?

"We're at a scrap-metal yard in New Jersey," Peggy's static-blurred voice said. "Daniel, listen to me. I'm not hurt. I'm fine. It's only that I appear to have my foot on what we assume is an anti-tank mine, and we need your help disarming it."

"You stepped on a land mine in New Jersey," he repeated, dazed. Only Peggy Carter, he thought. Only _God damn_ Peggy Carter.

"Sousa, don't panic," Jack ordered. "I'm standing right next to her, and _I'm_ not panicking." At least not panicking _much,_ Daniel was able to read between the lines.

"You're not my boss, Jack," Daniel shot back, more or less automatically. It did actually help somewhat, if only because the familiar cadence of snapping at Jack helped get his mind off the fact that Peggy was standing in Jersey with _her foot on a land mine._

"Okay," he said. "Okay." He ran his hand over his forehead, discovering that despite the relative cool of the office, he'd broken out in sweat. "Is it armed? I mean, do you know?"

"I heard it click when I put my foot on it," Peggy said.

God. _God._ "Hang on a second," he said, and lowered the phone. "Lewis!" he shouted, and when the startled junior agent stuck his head in the door: "Get some more people in here. Anyone you can find. I want every hand we've got down in the archives, pulling all the files we have on land mines. Especially schematics."

"Land mines?"

"You heard me!" Snatching up the receiver again, he asked, "I don't suppose you know what kind?"

"I'm sorry, Daniel," Peggy said, and her voice was so soft it was nearly obscured by static. There was a whole world of sorry contained in that one sentence. "I don't know."

"But you think it's an anti-tank mine."

"That's our assumption, yes."

"Anti-tank mines in particular!" Daniel shouted after Lewis. A fucking _land mine._ God, he'd been five minutes from clocking out. If they'd called a few minutes later, he would've been in the car. He'd planned to stop for food, and he was in no hurry to get back to the empty house. He might've left Peggy standing on a land mine for _hours_ \--

 _Stop panicking,_ he told himself, more or less in Jack's voice, because nothing could chase the cobwebs out of his brain like getting pissed off at Jack Thompson.

"We've got our office on the search for a bomb expert on our end," Jack said, cutting into Daniel's spinning thoughts. "If we find someone, you're off the hook. Meantime, we're freezing our asses off out here, so if we could move things along a little ..."

"Right. You're outside." He tried to picture the scene. A scrap-metal yard in Jersey. Peggy standing on a mine ... "Jack, I'm going to start by figuring out what kind of mine it is, all right? I need you to very gently brush the -- what's it covered with?"

"Gravel," Jack said.

"Gravel, then ... brush the gravel aside so you can figure out where the edges of the mine are. I need to find out how big it is and whether it has any markings."

"Will do." Jack grunted; Daniel pictured him crouching down. "Is this safe?"

"It's a fuc -- it's a land mine, Jack! Nothing about this is safe."

Peggy said something Daniel couldn't hear. "I didn't catch that," he said. "I can barely hear either one of you. What's the phone setup you're using out there?"

"Agent Ferguson's holding a radio next to the phone in the wrecking yard office," Jack said. "Carter asked if moving the gravel could change the weight on the mine and detonate it."

"If you're right that it's an anti-tank mine, I doubt it. They're not that sensitive. Peggy's weight might not even be enough to trigger it." But he sure as hell wasn't going to bet her life on it. "In case it's not, though, try not to put more weight on it, or push off anything that's already on top of it."

"That's wonderfully vague, Sousa, thank you."

There was a moment of crackling silence on the line. Daniel took advantage of the opportunity to pull a pad of paper toward himself.

"It's a dark grayish sort of color," Jack reported. "Round and made out of metal. It's a little more than a foot in diameter. Carter's got one foot on it, and the other on the ground beside it."

"I think it's a Teller mine, Daniel," Peggy said indistinctly in the background.

"I think you're probably right." It was easy to forget, sometimes, that she'd seen plenty of action during the war. Teller mines had been extensively used by the Germans against Allied vehicles. On the bright side, this meant Daniel had dealt with them before. On the not-so-bright side ... "Okay, listen, first of all, if it's a Teller mine, a single person's weight wouldn't be enough to trigger it. Which means it may not actually be armed at all. The click you heard might have been the anti-tampering device arming itself."

"Won't that also blow her up if we pull her off it?" Jack asked.

"If the main detonator isn't armed, then probably not. Only if you try to remove the detonator or move the bomb. However, there's another possibility, which is that it's been modified to detonate under less pressure. And if it's being deployed as an anti-personnel mine, I'm not going to bet that it isn't."

"So, what's the blast radius on these things?" Jack asked. "What if I grab her and roll to the side --"

"Don't!" Daniel snapped, lurching forward as if he could physically reach through the phone and grab hold to stop him. "Okay, look, maybe as an absolute last resort. The odds are not favorable, though, got it?"

"Got it," Jack said, in a meeker tone than Daniel was used to hearing from him.

Daniel looked down at the pad of paper in front of him, where a crude sketch of a Teller mine, drawn from memory, was starting to take shape.

 

***

 

Peggy had never realized it would be so difficult to do nothing except stand still, with her weight balanced slightly more on one foot than the other. It had been easier when she'd thought both her feet were on the mine. Now that she knew it was only her left foot, she had to second-guess herself every time her foot wobbled, every time her aching and increasingly abused hip and thigh muscles complained about the awkward position she was forcing them to remain in.

Jack was still crouched at her feet. The gravel had been gently cleared off enough of the mine that they could both see its curving edge, glistening with beads of water.

She'd never known much about explosives in the war, except some basic things about how to avoid them and how to assist, when she was called upon, in their deployment. She had seen Dernier use mines very much like this one, and she had watched them gingerly removed from French and Italian roads so Allied convoys could move through them.

She had never been this close to one before. It was almost as if she could feel a vibration under her foot. Imagination, she told herself.

On the other end of the radio, Daniel was quiet. Working on a solution, she hoped. 

Jack looked up from his contemplation of the mine. "How're you holding up?"

"As well as can be expected, I suppose." She had to lock her jaw to prevent her teeth from chattering.

"Cold?" he asked softly.

"If you are contemplating some sort of frivolously chivalrous gesture, such as giving me your coat, allow me to remind you that we are trying to avoid putting more weight on the pressure plate. Also, since it is quite likely that you're the one who will need to follow Daniel's instructions, it is very much in my best interests if your hands are steady."

"Got it." Jack shook his head, and smiled slightly. "Peggy --"

She never knew what he was going to say, because the radio crackled to life just then. "You two holding up okay?" Daniel's faint, distant voice asked.

"What else are we gonna do, Sousa?"

"Fair point," Daniel acknowledged. "Okay, for starters, these mines have a safety locking mechanism used for transport. Obviously you don't want to carry an armed mine around. If that locking pin is pushed in, the mine isn't live."

"Where is it?" Jack asked. From her vantage point, Peggy could see only the top of his head and his shoulders as he crouched beside the mine. _If it does blow,_ she thought, _it'll take his head off._ Of course, it would blow her into smithereens at the same time, so it wasn't as if she'd be around to worry about it.

"On the igniter switch at the top. If it's pressed down under her foot, it's not locked and is live."

Jack swept at the gravel around Peggy's shoe. "Pretty sure it's down."

"Okay. Wasn't gonna be that easy anyway." Daniel blew out a breath, and Peggy imagined him sitting at his desk, thoughts running rapidly behind his dark, lively eyes. "Okay, since you aren't going to be able to replace the locking pin, the next thing is to remove any anti-tampering devices it might have, and then very gently unscrew the pressure plate."

"Which she's standing on," Jack said.

"One thing at a time, okay? You're going to dig around the bomb looking for extra fuses. These little nasties usually have a hole drilled in the side for more igniters, and maybe one in the bottom. All the ones I dealt with were triggered by wires attached to stakes. If the mine is moved or the pressure plate is removed, it tugs on the wire and blows up. Those are the easy kind. All you have to do to disable the trap is to clip the wire."

"What's the hard kind?" Jack wanted to know.

"Mercury switches. They go off if it's jostled, and they're a lot harder to disarm."

Jack caught his breath on a sort of laugh. "So what you're saying is, dig carefully."

"Very carefully."

After a moment's thought, Jack pulled off his gloves. He took a torch from his pocket, turned it on, and laid it beside the mine; the light at the fence didn't penetrate very well into the man-made canyons of the wrecking yard, especially for this kind of close detail work. Then he began to gently pick at the gravel, tunneling away at the side of the mine. 

_This is going to take forever,_ Peggy thought unhappily, and then forced the unworthy thought away. Remembering how difficult it had been to crouch without redistributing her weight, she knew she couldn't have bent down and stayed still long enough to do what Jack was doing. She could not do this by herself.

And Jack didn't have to stay. He was putting himself in terrible danger by doing so.

"If you can find the carry handle," Daniel was saying, "the usual place for drilling a hole for extra explosives on a Teller mine is a few inches clockwise around the side from the handle."

Jack let out a sudden whistle and jerked his hands back as if he'd been burned. Peggy flinched and clamped her hands into fists, steeling herself not to move any more. _Hold still,_ she scolded herself; both her own life and Jack's depended on the steadiness of her nerves now.

"You said a wire, right?" Jack asked. "I think I found it."

Curious despite herself, Peggy craned her head to look. In the torch beam, the thin ribbon of wire glinted in the gravel. It seemed to be screwed to a small protrusion on the side of the mine.

"So I clip it, right?"

"Not yet!" Daniel snapped, his voice sharp enough to make Peggy flinch again. She pressed her fists against her thighs. _Excellent job staying steady, Agent Carter._

"Anytime today, Sousa ..."

"The way these were done in the field, it'll just be a wire attached to a stake," Daniel explained. "Fast and dirty was the order of the day. But your guy would've had all the time in the world to set up anti-tampering devices on his anti-tampering devices. If, say, there's an electrical current running through that wire --"

"Then clipping it will trigger the bomb. Right. Nothing's ever easy."

"It's not likely, but it's possible. You need to trace the wire back and find out what it's attached to."

"Right, I'm on it," Jack said, and then his head snapped up. So did Peggy's. Not too far away, a clatter rang out, somewhere in all those scrap-metal canyons, startlingly loud in the stillness of the night.

Jack straightened up in a fast, fluid motion and drew his gun. Peggy reached more carefully into her pocket to draw out her own. While she wasn't paying attention, the fog had crept in, masking both ends of their little canyon in gray murk.

Jack held out a hand. "Peggy, your radio? I don't want to change channels on Sousa." They'd gone to a nonstandard channel for the call to Daniel so they wouldn't be tying up the entire local SSR radio net.

Peggy started to hold it out, then stopped. "The weight."

"God," Jack groaned. "Okay, you do it. Call out front and find out if any of my agents are running around back here."

"This is Agent Carter." As she spoke into the radio, she kept looking around, not daring to take her eyes off anything around her. In glimpses she watched Jack stalk down the corridor, back the way they'd come, stepping carefully over the trip wire. Like her, he never stopped looking around. At the end of the corridor he stopped, turned around, and came back, just as Agent Ramirez was reassuring her that everyone was maintaining a cordon outside the wrecking yard as requested.

Jack leaned close to the radio to speak, while Peggy held it out for him. "If that's the case, then I'm pretty sure Calhoun is in here with us."

"You want backup, Chief?"

"I'm not gonna order you. But," Jack added, casting a quick glance over his shoulder at the fogscape around them, "if anyone wants to volunteer, I won't say no. Nobody comes in here without the understanding that it's going to be dangerous, though."

"What's going on?" Daniel asked plaintively through the radio.

Ramirez said, at the same time and without hesitation, "How many men do you need, Chief?"

"Jack," Peggy said firmly. "We cannot send people ahead into the unexplored parts of the yard. Not with land mines about."

"I know. I wasn't going to ask them to. But ..." Jack pointed behind him toward the junction with the next corridor. "Having someone cover our backs where we've already been -- useful, yeah?"

"Agreed," she said, with some reluctance.

"Two people, Ramirez," Jack said. "You're going to send them in following Carter's route exactly. When they turn the corner and see us, they'll stop there to cover us -- that ought to be far enough away to be reasonably safe if this thing blows, right?"

Peggy lifted her shoulders in a brief shrug.

"Guys!" Daniel said. "Talk to me!"

"Inform him of our current situation, would you?" Peggy said, nodding to the radio at their feet. "I'll walk them in."

While she was on the radio to Ramirez, explaining how to follow the route she'd taken, she kept her eyes moving, scanning the heaps of scrap metal around them. She kept expecting a sniper to appear atop one of the piles, framed against the city's dull orange glow in the cloudy sky, but nothing moved except drifting wisps of fog.

She caught nothing but snatches of Jack's exchange with Daniel: impatient and wryly amused on Jack's end, snappishly irritable on Daniel's. Poor Daniel, she thought. All those miles away. She knew all too well what it felt like to be on the other end of a radio, able to help only by reaching out with her voice, for what little good that would do ...

With the radio in one hand, Jack kept his gun out, covering her and scanning their enclosing metal walls with the same vigilance Peggy felt. Her heart lurched when two figures appeared in the fog at the end of the corridor, but Ramirez's voice said, "We're here," and a little of the tension locked around her stomach unclenched.

Jack tossed her a quick grin and knelt beside the mine. He laid down the radio, put his gun away, and carefully began to pick gravel away from the wire attached to the backup fuse.

Peggy kept her gun out. There wasn't much else she could do to help right now, and in the fog it was unlikely that their new backup, Ramirez and Stevens, would be able to see someone coming from the other direction -- at least not before they put a couple of bullets into Peggy and Jack. And it was a much-needed distraction. Her hips _hurt._ She was going to need a long hot bath, and possibly some of the strong-smelling liniment that Angie swore by after a long day on her feet at the Automat.

At least adrenaline had, for the moment, helped chase away the cold.

 

***

 

"What was all that about someone in there with you?" Daniel wanted to know.

"Our problem, not yours," Jack said over the radio. "Okay, I found your stake, and you're right, it's just a wire attached to a plain wooden stake. Cut it, right?"

"Hold on." Lewis and two other agents had just come up from the archives, arms loaded with files and rolled-up blueprints. Daniel swiped his paper and pencil off the desk and stabbed his finger at the desktop. Once the agents dumped their load, Daniel rifled frantically through it.

"You know, Daniel," Jack said conversationally through the receiver tucked against Daniel's chin, "it might be a warm, pleasant California night where _you_ are, but I think I'm losing the feeling in my toes. And Carter's turning blue."

"I certainly am not," came the distant, annoyed British tones.

In spite of his desperation, Daniel had to fight down a smile. "I know, just -- hang on --" Teller mines had been used so extensively throughout the war that there _had_ to be copious information on them .... and yes, here was one of the information leaflets he remembered. Daniel tilted it up to the light. "I'm double-checking a couple of things. I think you're safe to cut it." _Please, God, let cutting it be safe._ "Just do your best not to jostle anything. Gently as you can. If you've got a knife with a wire-cutter attachment, use that instead of the blade."

"I'm going for it now," Jack said.

Then there was nothing on the other end of the line but static, and Daniel held his breath, frozen in place with his hand locked on the corner of the desk, crumpling the leaflet.

As a recon scout, he'd never really been afraid. Possibly it was only that _everything_ was so dangerous. He knew men who'd died in the breakfast mess when a shell hit their tent, others who'd been shot while taking a leak in a supposedly cleared stretch of French forest, while visiting prostitutes, while doing every casual thing a person could do. Every moment could have been his last, and after awhile the constant awareness of mortal danger dulled into a background hum. If anything, he'd felt safer than usual as he worked to disarm a bomb, because at least that way he knew the danger factors were within his control. Whether he lived or died was up to him, and that was a kind of control over his fate that the war gave him precious little of.

He had never been afraid then like he was afraid now, able to do nothing but listen to the sound of long-distance static like the rush of wind in the trees. There might not even be an audible explosion, he thought, if the radio cut out. He might not _know_ \--

"She's cut," Jack said, and Daniel wobbled against the edge of the desk. A quick glance at the clock let him know that mere seconds had passed, crawling by for him like minutes. The desk's polished wood was damp under his palm.

"Nice job," he said.

Jack laughed softly, relief mingled with the kind of ready camaraderie that Daniel had experienced before with other people under shared danger, shared tension -- an easy warmth coming across the miles to touch Daniel with its sense of connection. "I'm going to guess the next step is to repeat the previous steps another dozen times."

"I hope you won't have to. Usually there are only two secondary fuses, one on the side and one underneath. I'm going to have you check around the sides for additional booby traps and then dig down to see if the bottom one is armed, and once you clear that, you can start disabling the pressure plate."

Daniel swept a clear space on his desktop and spread out the diagram. He hardly needed it, though. It was all coming back to him, the smell of mud and the burn of cold in his fingers as he worked with painstaking care to clip tiny wires, while Mulroney, the guy who'd taught him, crouched over him insulting his heritage every time his hand slipped.

Mulroney hadn't made it through the war. He'd gone the way a lot of recon scouts did, though Daniel never found out whether he'd been shot or got himself blown up; no one on Mulroney's team that day had come back to talk about it.

One thing Daniel didn't plan to tell Jack was that he'd never actually done what he was walking Jack through, at least not on a live bomb, though he'd practiced on a dummy. He'd cut a few trip wires in his time while clearing roads, and disarmed a mined bridge abutment or two, but going to all the time, effort, and risk to disable a multiply booby-trapped Teller mine was a luxury they'd rarely had. Usually they cleared mines by throwing rocks or grenades at them, or just flagged them so they could be avoided.

"Hey, Chief," Agent Baxter said, leaning in the door. The outer office had all the lights on now, and a half-dozen or so agents were in sight. "LAPD's calling in their bomb guy. They're having him come straight over here."

"Thanks," Daniel said absently. Good thing this wasn't an actual bomb threat in L.A., he thought, if this was the sort of response he could expect.

Over the radio he could hear intermittently, through the static, the rattle of rocks as Jack sifted for more trip wires along the sides of the mine. "You know, Sousa," Jack said suddenly. "It doesn't surprise me at all that you were a recon scout."

Trust Jack to take advantage of the opportunity to poke at him. "I didn't get my leg blown off with a mine, Jack," Daniel said snappishly, sifting through the other files his agents had brought him. Lewis darted in to drop off another handful and then fled. Daniel sorted out two more files with Teller mine diagrams, one of which had a detailed drawing of the bottom trigger that might come in handy.

A pause for more sifting of rocks, and then Jack said, "That's not what I meant. It just figures that you'd do something like that in the war. Brave and stupid and sneaky and clever. War-hero stuff."

Daniel had no idea how to respond to that. In the background, he heard Peggy say, "Seems you're proving a fair hand at bomb-clearing yourself these days, Chief Thompson."

Daniel had been managing to do a decent job, for the most part, not thinking about Peggy, and how directly her survival hinged on Daniel giving Jack the right instructions. So far, he hadn't really talked to her at all; it was much easier to focus on the task at hand. _Should I say something to her? Tell her ..._ But he couldn't think of anything that needed to be said, especially not on an open channel. He and Peggy had said a pleasant goodbye three days ago, laced with sweet nothings. Their jobs were dangerous. They both knew every goodbye could be the last one.

_Or we keep telling ourselves that. But we don't really believe it, do we? Any more than I knew the last time Mulroney bummed a cigarette off me really was the last time._

"Still there, Sousa?"

"I'm here." His voice on the line was more than just a source of instructions for them, he thought. It was a lifeline to a brighter and safer world, a world they hoped to get back to. But having realized that, he found himself stuck for anything else to say. "Find anything?" he tried.

"Just a lot of dirt. So, if I don't find anything, then we dig, right?"

"Then we dig under it, yeah." Though he hadn't quite figured out how to stop the bomb from shifting with Peggy actually standing on it. Maybe if they shoved something under it -- at the very least, they had a lot of raw materials to work with, doing this in a junkyard. Daniel reached for his pad of paper again and began to scribble, crude sketches that wouldn't have meaning to anyone but him, trying to work out a structural brace that would be easy to make from materials they had at hand.

"Anything Peggy can do to help? She looks kind of bored, standing there."

"I am not in the least bored," was Peggy's unsurprising response, and Daniel grinned to himself.

"If you need something to do, Carter, you could pick up a shovel," Jack said.

"She'd got one job right now, Jack, and that job is standing there without moving." Daniel's pencil traced quick stabbing lines across the page, scribbled out one drawing, started another ... "And knowing Peggy, I'm sure she's doing a great job at it." If only he was there; if only he could see firsthand what they had available, and what they needed. He was desperately afraid of making a fatal mistake because of something he couldn't see to warn them about.

"You wouldn't believe the job she's doing." That was actual pride in Jack's voice; it made Daniel glance up for a moment from his sketches.

"Yes sir," Jack went on, "if they gave out gold medals for standing still, they'd be pinning one on Peggy right now ..."

"I swear to God, Jack," Peggy said, and the mingled amusement and exasperation in her voice was so vivid that Daniel could, for an instant, see her face and the expression she must be wearing.

"Just trying to keep the situation -- _Peggy!"_

And, on the other end of the line, there was rapid scuffling and then nothing clearly identifiable through the static.

"Jack! Jack, what happened? Peggy?!" 

Daniel was on his feet now. The mundane world of his office had faded away; he was focused so intensely on every sound through the telephone receiver that he could almost taste the cold, damp night wind of a Jersey November.

He could still hear things in the background -- voices, indistinct; the bomb hadn't exploded, he was fairly sure. But what had happened, what was going on now, he had no idea.

"Peggy," he said desperately, but no one answered him.

 

***

 

Jack's first, lethal instinct when he realized they were being shot at was to lunge up from his crouched position and tackle Peggy to the ground. He caught himself in mid-lunge and staggered sideways, falling to one knee and sliding ingloriously on gravel. His toe caught on the stake he'd just cut free of the bomb, and he nearly threw up. But the stake was no longer attached to the bomb (mere moments earlier, of course, it would have been). 

Nothing blew up. The shooting had stopped, leaving his ears ringing in the silence.

But Peggy had been hit. He'd seen her stagger, at the same moment that the first gunshot reached his ears. Ramirez and Stevens had returned fire -- he was only now piecing together the chronology of events. Someone had fired at them from the far end of the corridor between the scrap-metal piles -- exactly what he'd been afraid of; it was likely in the fog that the shooter (ex-Agent Calhoun, without a doubt) hadn't even noticed Ramirez and Stevens at the other end, instead assuming Peggy and Jack were alone and unprotected. 

Ramirez and Stevens had been firing blind, shooting past Jack and Peggy into the fog. Since the firing had stopped on both ends, Jack was going to have to assume that Calhoun had been driven back, for now.

And Peggy was standing with her arm dangling at her side, staring at Jack wide-eyed. He had never seen her look like that before, shocked and afraid. "Jack," she said, and for an awful instant he expected her to fall, crumpling slowly as blood blossomed across her dark blue jacket, followed by a rising ball of shrapnel and fire -- Then she said, "I dropped my gun."

"Oh." He looked down at the pistol that had fallen in the gravel between them. 

"I dropped it _off_ the mine," Peggy clarified. She was taking slow, deep breaths -- calming herself, Jack realized. "We don't know how sensitive it is to weight changes. I don't know how much more my weight can afford to change right now -- and ... Jack, I'm not too steady on my feet."

 _Me neither,_ he started to say, but then he realized what she meant. Peggy Carter didn't just _drop_ her gun while under fire. He looked at her more carefully, at her right arm hanging like deadweight at her side. The beads of moisture gathering at the tips of her fingers were dark, not like water at all ...

"Peggy, you're hit --"

"Chief!" Ramirez called from behind him, and Jack looked around quickly at the voice and the crunch of gravel under shoes.

"Tripwire!" he barked, throwing up a hand, and Ramirez and Stevens both skidded to a stop seconds before setting off God only knew what other booby trap lurking to catch the unwary in this labyrinth from Hell.

Jack cursed viciously. He felt horribly exposed -- God, it was like the war all over again, the steel canyons of scrap metal shutting out the view, the fog narrowing their world even further, while enemies lurked just beyond sight and every step could trigger something lethal. He had to squeeze his eyes shut for a moment to ground himself in the here and now.

"Ramirez, Stevens, back to your post," he ordered them. He was still on the ground, one leg splayed out. He picked himself up carefully.

"Chief, the shooter --"

"Is still at large, I know, and your job is to cover our backs _without_ leaving yourselves wide open to get blown up or shot, okay? And for God's sake --" He pointed at the trip wire, barely visible at all from this angle. "Move something to mark that. A barrel, a sawhorse, anything portable. Just be careful where you move it from. Look for wires first. And radio back to the front gate so we don't have a dozen guys charging in here playing cowboy, okay?"

He picked up Peggy's gun, thought about returning it to her, and decided not to. She had shifted her position noticeably; her legs were farther apart -- the one on the mine's trigger was still planted firmly where it had been, but the other had slid away, producing a weird spraddle-legged effect. He decided not to point out that she'd moved, since it clearly hadn't detonated the bomb. It was evident just from looking at her that she was having to work hard to stay upright. She was swaying slightly where she stood.

"Jack," Peggy said, forcing a smile. "I believe we're in trouble."

"Not as long as you stay standin' there." He looked around for the radio, which had gone flying when he'd sprung into motion. Daniel was probably having a fit.

"Jack, I think now would be a good time for you to leave."

"Where the hell did the damn thing go?" He could hear it squawking at him; he just couldn't see it. And it was tough to look for it while keeping his gun out and his attention on the fog-shrouded world around him.

"Jack!" Peggy said, sharply enough to draw his attention to her with a moment's concern that she might be about to fall over. "Jack, I do _not_ know how long I can stay on my feet. Also, you've noticed we're taking fire, correct?"

"Not anymore." The radio. There. Aha.

"Chief!" What he got on the other end wasn't Daniel; it was a panicked Ferguson.

"Situation's under control, Agent." Actually it was about as far from under control as it could get, but if Jack knew one thing, it was that no good came of panicking your subordinates. "Put Sousa back on, right now."

"Right away, Chief. Sorry, Chief."

He got Daniel in the middle of a tirade. "-- gonna kill you, Jack!"

"You'll have to stand in line."

Daniel flustered to a stop. "What happened?" he asked, more calmly.

"The perp came back," Jack said tersely. "He's gone now." He hoped. "Got in a few shots first."

"Are you two okay?"

Jack honestly wasn't quite sure what to say to that. They needed Daniel unpanicky and thinking clearly. On the other hand, hiding the seriousness of the situation from the guy who was working on the plan to save their ass was a kind of stupidity he didn't want to indulge in.

Also, as he watched Peggy waver as she stood, he realized that they'd already run out of time for complicated plans. There was no way she could keep standing there while he tunneled into the sewer system or whatever the hell Daniel had in mind. If Calhoun didn't come back to finish what he'd started, blood loss was going to get her a long time before Jack could get all the little wires clipped and the screws unscrewed.

"Jack!"

"Okay, here's the deal," Jack said, eyes on Peggy. Not like there was anything he could do if she _did_ fall over, but maybe he could ... dive and catch her, pull her away, or _something._ Or at least take cover himself. "The asshole winged Peggy."

"Winged as in shot?" Daniel said in a choked voice.

"We gotta get out of here, Sousa. We gotta go _now._ You remember we talked about having her jump off the mine? I think we're back to that now."

"You can't!" Daniel said. "Didn't I make that clear? There's no way you can get out of the blast zone in time. That thing is designed to take out _tanks,_ Jack. You don't wanna know what it'll do to a human body."

"I was in the war same as you," Jack snapped. "I don't have to imagine; I _know._ We're going to have to do this anyway."

"I don't think you understand how dangerous this is!"

"And I don't think _you_ understand how little choice we have." 

Jack looked sharply at Peggy, ignoring Daniel's angry protests over the radio. He wasn't entirely sure she could hear him. Her eyes were half closed; it looked like she was throwing everything she had just into staying on her feet. Still, he turned away from her, speaking softly into the radio as soon as he had a moment of silence to speak into.

"Daniel," he said. "Peggy's been shot. She's losing blood fast. She's gonna faint, or fall over, or something like that any minute now. And when she does, you know what'll happen. I don't want to do this either, but we don't have a choice. So get your brain working, and find us a way to survive this!"

Give Daniel credit: he wasn't slow. Jack could almost hear the sound of his brain shifting gears, from protests to problem-solving mode. "You're in a junkyard, right? Can you find something to shelter behind? Something big and heavy."

"That's pretty smart, Sousa." He should have thought of it himself. Jack scanned the piles of junk around him. "Hey, Stevens, Ramirez, you guys still there? I got a job for you."

He wasn't entirely sure what the thing they found was -- a bulldozer blade, a piece of a cement mixer; whatever its job in life, as a rusty piece of junk it was massive and made of solid iron, and looked like it'd do a credible job stopping a blast. It took all three of them to haul it to the mine site, while Peggy stood with her fists clenched and her entire, formidable force of will focused on staying upright.

"Okay, now you guys clear out," he told the other two agents. "Not just to the turn this time. Get _out._ When this thing goes, there's no telling what else it'll set off. Whole place could go sky-high." There was a certain fierce satisfaction in the thought. If he did die here, at least he'd take that asshole Calhoun with him.

"You should go with them, Jack." Peggy's voice behind him, low and fierce. "You've done more than enough. I can jump on my own."

"Yeah?" he said, giving her a skeptical look. "In the shape you're in? You want to be a matched set with Sousa -- his right leg, your left one?"

"That's not funny, Jack," Daniel said sharply over the radio.

"Peggy's smilin'."

Actually her face was contorted in an expression he couldn't quite name. "Jack, if you come any closer, I _will_ hit you."

Peggy being Peggy, that probably wasn't an idle threat, but he got in her face anyway. "Yeah? Seems like I remember you running through live machine gun fire to get to me, or was that some other Peggy Carter?" He took her good hand, trying not to notice how cold her fingers were in his. "Let's do this."

"Jack, no." She tried to pull her hand away.

"You really want to have a wrestling match on top of a bomb?" he countered. "Cause I know who'll win, and it isn't either one of us."

"You have to get _out_ of here." Peggy's voice cracked, and he knew then, right down to the bottom of his soul, that he didn't want to hear that kind of desperation in her voice, not ever again.

"I will. You and me both will. So get ready to jump when I say jump."

Daniel's voice said over the radio, making Jack flinch at the unexpected sound: "Peggy, I love you."

For Daniel's sake, he ought to turn the damn thing off. If everything did go sky-high, Daniel shouldn't have to hear it. But there was something about it that made all of this just a little bit easier, having someone to bear witness.

 _Nobody likes to die alone,_ he thought, irrationally.

Peggy gave a soft laugh, and tears glimmered in her eyes. "I love you too, Daniel."

There was a silence; she and Jack looked at each other across their linked hands. There weren't any words there. But, between Peggy and himself, words had only ever made things more difficult. Words were what had always gotten them balled up.

"Jack ..." Daniel said.

"Yeah, it's been complicated," he said sharply, cutting off wherever Daniel was going with that, and squeezed Peggy's hand. "So are we going to stand here talking all day, or do this? On three."

"My count," she said.

"Wouldn't expect anything else."

But he chimed in on her "one," and Daniel joined them on "two."

"Three," they chorused together, and Peggy leaped with impressive strength as Jack wrenched her arm, flinging them both in a bruising tumble over the rusty edges of their makeshift bomb shelter.

 

***

 

"-- Three."

Daniel had been braced for it, but he still yanked the receiver away from his ear as a painful burst of static drilled into his eardrum.

They might not still have the radio, he reminded himself, staring at the receiver.

Or Peggy might be bleeding out from a hundred wounds, with Jack desperately trying to staunch the bleeding ...

Or they might both have died instantly ...

He couldn't feel anything. A businesslike calm had settled over him.

"Chief!" Ferguson's desperate voice spoke tinnily out of the receiver, and Daniel put it back to his ear.

"Agent," he said, surprised by how calm his voice sounded. "Can you raise Chief Thompson or Agent Carter?"

"No, sir." Ferguson sounded badly rattled. "We've got a couple guys going in now. We'll know in a minute."

"Let me know as soon as you know, Agent."

He sank down at his chair, pressed the knuckles of his free hand against his forehead until the skin hurt, and tried to think about nothing at all.

 

***

 

The blast lifted the heavy metal enclosure and kicked it across the gravel, knocking Jack and Peggy around like dice rattling in a cup. Then nothing was moving and a shower of falling gravel pattered down on them like rain.

Jack slowly untwisted himself from the desperately contorted pretzel-shape he'd ended up in, wrapped partly around Peggy and partly around his own softer parts. His ears rang and everything had a muffled quality, but ...

 _I'm alive,_ he thought in amazement. He hadn't been at all sure that he would be.

"Peggy?" His voice sounded like it was underwater. 

He sat up and tugged at her, trying to get her spread out so he could see her better. She was limp and terribly cold, her sleeve soaked with blood, but when he patted at her dirty face, her lips parted in a gasp. She was breathing. She seemed to have passed out when they hit.

Jack couldn't see any sign of the radio, or his gun. Somewhere distant, he half-heard and half-felt muffled footsteps and voices, and he thought, _If any of those idiots hits that tripwire, I'll kick whatever's left of his ass._

Someone really needed to get on the horn to Daniel and let him know how things turned out before he imploded from sheer frustration.

But for the moment, all Jack could do was sit here, with Peggy sprawled in his lap, feeling her breathe, listening to the beating of his own heart, and thinking, _We're alive._

 

***

Epilogue

 

Daniel came into the hospital rumpled and exhausted, straight off a sixteen-hour, three-stage cross-country flight on which he'd been too wired to sleep. He didn't have so much as a toothbrush with him, and in particular he'd forgotten the necessity of a coat in New York in November. Instead he was wearing a shirt with palm fronds on it and a light cotton jacket, both of which he'd put on a good thirty-six hours earlier, leaving them somewhat the worse for wear. By the time he got from the cab into the hospital's lobby through an unpleasant mix of sleet and rain, he was a little surprised that the duty nurse hardly glanced at him before directing him to Peggy's room. Presumably they saw a lot worse in the course of a day's business.

He found Jack sitting on a chair in the corridor on Peggy's floor, staring at nothing. Jack scrambled to his feet at the sight of him. Jack, Daniel was annoyed to notice, had characteristically taken the time to shave, change, and possibly sleep during the intervening better part of a day; he was as put together as usual, the only exception the bandage swathed around his right hand.

They stared at each other awkwardly for a minute or two, with the uneasiness of two people who had gone through a life-threatening experience together (at a geographical distance, but still) and were now uncertain how to proceed. Then Daniel muttered, "Screw it," and seized Jack by a fistful of his shirt, dragging him into a hard, one-armed hug. He caught a brief glimpse of Jack's alarmed expression before hugging the stuffing out of him.

"Thank you," he said into Jack's shoulder. " _Thank_ you."

"It's nothing she hasn't done for me." Jack gave his back a few awkward pats before trying to disentangle himself. "Sousa, I appreciate the sentiment and all, but people are going to stare."

There wasn't anyone else in the hallway, though, and he squeezed Daniel's shoulder in the course of letting go, and grinned at him like he didn't want to but couldn't quite contain himself.

"What happened to your hand?" Daniel asked, getting his feet back under himself (metaphorically and literally).

"Oh, that," Jack said, glancing down at it. "Ripped myself open on our bomb shelter. I didn't even notice 'til we were clearing out and I looked down and found out I looked like I'd stuck a knife in a pig."

"Vivid, Jack. Thanks."

"Not as vivid as your shirt. Where do you _find_ those?"

Daniel waved it off impatiently, not in the mood for a round of their usual semi-friendly sniping. "Peggy," he said.

"Right." Jack turned serious. "She's out of surgery and doing fine. Actually, there's been a constant stream of visitors. Her former roommate was here a little bit ago -- Martinelli. Stark's been around, too. And I hear rumors of Jarvises in our near future."

"But she's okay," Daniel said, a little helplessly.

"Why don't you see for yourself? She's right in there."

He took two eager steps, then turned back. "What about Calhoun?"

"Ah, yeah." Jack flashed him a quick, bright grin, a quintessential Jack Thompson expression. "One of my teams picked him up legging it away from the salvage yard. He heard the explosion, thought he just killed two SSR agents, panicked, and decided to run for it. Good thing for us; he could've holed up in there for days while we tried to figure out a plan for going in. Instead he came to us."

"You know, I never thought I'd say this," Daniel said, "but I hope you hit him hard."

Jack's grin took on a feral edge. "So, yeah, that might be the other thing that happened to my hand."

"Good," Daniel said fiercely, and opened the door to Peggy's room.

She was lying in a heap of pillows, looking wan and exhausted and beautiful. Her eyes were closed when Daniel walked in, but cracked open when he sat down beside the bed.

"Daniel," she said, and struggled for a moment, trying to push herself upright and wincing as she tried to move her heavily bandaged right arm.

"Settle down. I think you're supposed to be resting." He halted her gently with a hand on her chest, then leaned in to kiss her until she stopped trying to move and relaxed.

When he pulled back at last, she gazed up at him with half-lidded eyes. "You poor man," she murmured, reaching up to brush back a lock of his hair -- in the rain and general New York humidity, he could tell it had sprung loose into a mess of curls. "You look as if you haven't slept in days."

"I can't believe you stepped on a land mine in New Jersey. This is one for the record books."

"It could have happened to anyone," she protested weakly.

Given the circumstances, it could have, and Daniel thought about the consequences if someone less alert to their surroundings than Peggy had walked into one of the booby traps first. How many people might have died in that junkyard?

"I'm just saying, I might think twice the next time Jack wants to borrow you for an assignment."

Peggy laughed, a tired little huff of breath. "Are you forgetting you aren't my boss again?"

He kissed the tip of her nose and the soft place beneath her eye, where her lashes brushed her cheek when she blinked. "Just keep yourself safe. Please."

She was clearly struggling to stay awake. She managed to hang on for another few minutes, long enough to chat lightly about his flight, and secured a promise that he was going to go get himself some rest and a proper bath, before her eyes closed and she drifted off.

He sat there for a while longer, holding her good hand and watching her sleep, before he got up and made his way out of her room as quietly as possible with the crutch.

He was expecting Jack to be long gone, but the lanky blond form unfolded from the same chair in the hallway. "You keeping guard on her, or what?" Daniel asked.

"Not really. Just planning on heading out, and I figured I'd offer you a ride uptown if you wanted one. Of course," he added, reaching for his hat on the chair next to him, "I might not have bothered to stick around if I'd known I was going to have to wait through a full conjugal visit."

Daniel could feel himself blushing. "She's in a hospital bed, man. Have some tact. ... Oh wait, forgot who was talking to."

Jack grinned, twirled the hat and clapped it onto his head. "So, you want a ride or not? I assume you're heading up to Stark's place."

"Uh, I hadn't really thought about it." There was plenty of room, but he'd be dropping in on Angie Martinelli unannounced. Was that really appropriate? He found himself flinching away from the idea of showing up damp and bedraggled on her doorstep, begging the use of a bedroom and a bath and probably some of Stark's clothes. "Just take me to a hotel. That'll do for tonight."

"Really?" Jack's demeanor shifted, his confidence growing a little more obviously forced and fragile. "You know, my place has a spare bedroom, you wanna crash there. I really don't care. I'll probably be at the office so much you won't see me."

Under other circumstances, Daniel might have argued; right now he was too tired and jet-lagged and still so grateful and relieved over Peggy that he could hardly draw breath. "Sure," he said. "Thanks."

Jack looked surprised enough that it made Daniel wonder for an instant if he'd actually _wanted_ to get an affirmative answer, but then he grinned. "I owe you a drink anyway. For not getting me blown up. Buy you a round?"

The way Daniel saw it, he was the one who owed Jack a drink -- and a hell of a lot more than that. But it was a place to start. "Yeah," he said, and grinned back. "First round's on you."

**Author's Note:**

> If you want more info on Teller mines, these are the resources that I mainly used while I was writing this fic:
> 
> • [some diagrams and descriptions on how to defuse them](http://www.lonesentry.com/manuals/german-warfare-libyan-desert/s8-german-mines.html)  
> • [info page with diagrams](http://www.lonesentry.com/articles/ttt/german-tellermines.html)  
> • [land mine anti-handling device diagram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Landmine_anti-handling_devices.png)  
> • [Teller mine cross section](http://www.lexpev.nl/images/tmine42drawing.jpg)  
> • [Teller mine on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller_mine)
> 
> The first two are from official wartime publications of the era, so I imagine those are some of the documents Daniel is looking at while he's on the phone to Jack and Peggy.


End file.
